By Obidike Chukwuebuka
The reported “alleged” arrest of hushpuppy, a flamboyant large living Instagram celebrity who constantly poses by Roll Royce cars and other expensive cars in designer apparel such as Gucci, Balenciaga and the likes; who is seemingly a role model for many Nigerian Youths has set the social media ablaze.
Reading the comments of many of these young Nigerians, it is obvious that we are a nation in danger as the signs of a poor moral infrastructure is evident. Should we really blame these youths who live in a country where illicit wealth is flaunted around by politicians and men using the cloak of religion with impunity.
This is a nation where merit is hardly valued and the sources of people’s wealth are hardly questioned. It is sad to note that we have raised a generation who believe that the end justifies the means as seen in some of the comments on hushpuppy. How do you explain why a parent will buy leaked WAEC question papers for their children so they can pass exams? What are they teaching them? This sadly has become the order of the day and many secondary schools are doing the same in order to get their students to score high grades so that they would get more students enrolled and obviously increase revenue.
I remember coming home on holidays one day from secondary wearing a fez cap that a friend had given me, and the first question my father would ask was, “where did you get that cap from”? I almost froze to death. I was raised by parents who knew every item they bought me and would question everything they saw with me that they didn’t buy.
Some present-day parents do not care to find out about the sources of what their children come home with. When their daughters return home to that 2-bedroom apartment in the low-income parts of the city with the latest iPhone XI, do they get questioned about its source? Some would even ask their daughter to buy them one. Young boys are buying gadgets and cars from the product of advanced fee fraud, YahooYahoo etc. and some parents encourage it by taking them to witchdoctors to scale up their fraudulent practice to Yahoo plus.
I know that the law says that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty. While we await the outcome of his arrest by INTERPOL, we must learn to ask the right questions when we see people display wealth that has no clear work ethic foundation. Until our moral compass is set right and our value system is realigned, we cannot truly develop as a nation.
A broken family system results in a broken nation and unless the family is fixed, disaster looms on the horizon.